14 DAY TRIAL // Emmy Award winner and USA Today tech columnist Jennifer Jolly says in an article published on February 2 that her iPad started acting strange after moving to a new place in a Spanish-speaking area of Oakland, California.
Despite not making any changes to the language settings on the iPad, apps installed on the device began showing ads in Spanish, with Jolly wondering if Siri listened to conversations in the house or just used location-based tracking to display advertisements.
“While I don’t speak Spanish (very well at least), my husband does and was doing so daily with contractors in our new house within "earshot" of my iPad,” she writes.
“With Siri voice-assistance active, is my gadget, or the TV apps on it, specifically working to better predict my wants and needs – and providing Spanish speaking commercials – to be more ‘helpful?’”
Location-based tracking
Last year, it was discovered that Apple contractors were listening to part of Siri conversations for what the Cupertino-based tech giant described as the “Siri quality evaluation process,” which, technically, is supposed to help improve the digital assistant.
Apple, however, said in August 2019 that it stopped saving audio recordings of Siri interactions following the public backlash in an attempt to improve user privacy. And instead of using hired contractors to listen to audio samples when users agree with it, the company would use only employees for this purpose.
“Before we suspended grading, our process involved reviewing a small sample of audio from Siri requests — less than 0.2 percent — and their computer-generated transcripts, to measure how well Siri was responding and to improve its reliability,” Apple said.
Jennifer Jolly says there’s a good chance the iPad isn’t listening to conversations, despite the fact that experts confirmed this is possible. After deleting local data of apps like Bravo and Hulu and reinstalling them, the displayed ads no longer used Spanish, she says.
“I also stopped mindlessly clicking “Accept” every time a web page asks me if it’s okay to use cookies to “personalize and enhance my experience” on their site as a result – but this is all just the tip of the privacy iceberg,” Jolly concludes.